The Hidden Danger of Big Data

As the Internet expands into new realms of physical space through the Internet of Things, the price of anarchy will become a crucial metric in our society, and the temptation to eliminate it with the power of big data analytics will grow stronger.Examples of this abound. Consider the familiar act of buying a book online through Amazon. Amazon has a mountain of information about all of its users – from their profiles to their search histories to the sentences they highlight in e-books – which it uses to predict what they might want to buy next. As in all forms of centralized artificial intelligence, past patterns are used to forecast future ones. Amazon can look at the last ten books you purchased and, with increasing accuracy, suggest what you might want to read next.

But here we should consider what is lost when we reduce the level of anarchy. The most meaningful book you should read after those previous ten is not one that fits neatly into an established pattern, but rather one that surprises or challenges you to look at the world in a different way.